Main menu

You are here

Gym Simple Released on the App Store

Submitted by bensmiley on Sun, 04/27/2014 - 22:19

Today we released Gym Simple to the app store. About 6 months ago I started going to the gym again, I spoke to a friend who's a personal trainer and he set me up with a series of exercises to do. I would run for half an hour then do some weights. Unfortunately, I have a bad memory so I'd forget the weight I should be lifting. Usually I'd just try to guess - 10kg looks about right... After I found that that didn't work I started writing down my workouts in the 'Notes' app on my iPhone. That was much better but it was still a bit messy. I decided that enough was enough and went to the app store to find a good app for the gym. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The apps seemed to come in two flavours:

Overly featured: These apps try to do everything. They come pre-programmed with every exercise under the sun. They show you which muscle group each weight trains, they come with built-in workouts. For me, this was too much. I just wanted to record my workout. I didn't want the app to be full of functionality that I was never going to use.

Ugly or buggy: There were some simple workout apps but they were mostly horrible. Gym Hero has hundreds of positive reviews and seemed ok but the interface is terrible. I'm a developer and graphic designer so can't stand bad design. It also wanted to charge me for basic things like being able to change the name of a workout!

More for myself than anything else I decided to try to do it properly. Gym Simple is a simple, easy to use, beautifully presented exercise and workout tracker.

Exercises:

The base unit in Gym Simple is an exercise. An exercise has a name, an icon and some units. Lets look at an example:

If you use the cross trainer, you could add an exercise like this:

Name: Cross Trainer

Unit 1: difficulty

Unit 2: time

If you wanted to do a bench press the exercise would look like this:

Name: Bench press

Unit 1: Sets

Unit 2: Reps

Unit 3: Weight

Once you've added exercises, each time you train, you can enter the details and the app will remember your history.

Workouts:

Exercises can then be added to workouts. Maybe you train cardio once a week so the workout would look like this:

Name: Cardio

Exercise 1: Cross Trainer

Exercise 2: Running

Exercise 3: Stepper

When you click on each exercise you can see exactly what you did last time! This helps you balance what you do this time and see how you're improving.

I also added a graphs module to the app so you can plot any exercise on a graph to see how you're doing.

Anyway Gym Simple is available on the App Store now. It's free so download it and give it a go! Gym Simple